About Marius Filmalter and Marius Golf
Professional Golf Instructor
Marius Filmalter is a professional golf instructor, inventor and research scientist. A native South African, Marius moved to Germany in the early eighties where he was the Director of Instruction at Beuerberg Golf Club, just outside Munich. Along with teaching and course management, Marius began his research on the yips.
What are the yips?
The yips are commonly described as an involuntary spasm or twitch that happens during the putting stroke, more specifically, right before impact. Besides golfers, the yips can effect athletes in other sports such as pitchers in baseball or quarterbacks in football. It can also influence a wide variety of occupations such as pilots, musicians, dentists and even surgeons.
Yips Research
Once the system was developed, Marius and his team began building a stroke database to compare a “yipped” putt to a good one. He collected data from players on the European PGA Tour. As a byproduct, he started realizing big differences between the strokes of great and poor putters.
Marius’ ground-breaking presentation of his putting research at the 2003 European PGA Expo in Munich, Germany transformed him from a relative unknown to the world’s hottest putting commodity.
Marius received invitations to conduct further research in the USA from two of the game’s well known instructors, Hank Haney and Dave Pelz. Marius chose to continue his putting research at the Hank Haney Golf Ranch in McKinney, Texas for four and a half years. He had full access to the top players on the PGA TOUR including Tiger Woods. A part of Marius’ research is featured in Hank Haney’s book, “Fix the Yips Forever.”
In 2008, Marius presented his research “Motor Strategy Disturbances in Golf: The Effect of Yips on the Movement of the Putter Head” at the World Scientific Congress of Golf, held in Phoenix, Arizona.
GOLF Magazine awarded Marius the “Innovator of the Year” in 2009. A long overdue recognition for his contributions to the golf industry. And in 2011, GOLF Magazine wrote a cover story on Marius describing him as “…the man who will change the way you putt for good.”
Developing the SAM Puttlab
For the first time in the history of golf
In the late nineties, Marius along with his friend and mentor, Professor Ernst Pöppel of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, developed new and more effective methods to facilitate the proper communication between mind and body. As an outgrowth of their studies, Marius was the prime inventor in the development of Super SAM (now SAM Puttlab.)
For the first time in the history of golf, Marius and his device could rapidly and with high precision, determine where the putter head is in space at any time during the stroke. It measures, amongst others, where the putter is aimed at address and impact, the path of the stroke, the acceleration and speed of the putter head during the stroke and most important, club head rotation throughout the motion.